Unlocking different manifestations of reading impairments in opaque and shallow orthographies
Unlocking different manifestations of reading impairments in opaque and shallow orthographies
In this symposium we discuss how visual and phonological impairments are manifested in developmental dyslexic (DD) readers of alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages with deep (English, Chinese) and shallow (Spanish, Japanese Kana) orthographies. For alphabetic languages, English (deep) DD-readers showed dual visual-phonological impairments captured in speed and accuracy, while Spanish (shallow) DD-readers showed a phonological deficit in reading speed only, with greater errors in spelling. For non-alphabetic languages, Japanese DD-readers showed impairments in both reading speed and accuracy when reading in Kana (shallow), and these impairments were phonological in nature. Interestingly reading skills of Chinese (deep), especially those with DD, improved when they were taught Chinese characters in an analytical manner – that is, characters with the same visual configuration patterns were grouped together by phonetic radicals.